Chuckleheaded

Martin “I am a serious” Amis’s book about the scrotum-tighteningly horroristic age in which we live in has attracted an exhilaratingly vituperative review by Michiko Kakutani in today’s New York Times. She starts as she means to go on, referring in the first sentence to “one of these chuckleheaded essays”. Lovely.

But then I began to wonder: what does “chuckleheaded” really mean? I had always vaguely assumed that it was an American coinage dating from within the last century or so, and had fondly visualized a person with a big squishy yellow cartoon head; or alternatively, a person so irredeemably stupid that he does nothing but chuckle: a laughing fool.

Checking in the OED, though, I find that it has been possible to be a chucklehead since as long ago as 1730. In Thomas Bridge’s Homer travestie (1764), we find the following remarkable couplet:

You think the rock of Troy
Some chuckle-headed booby boy.

(He didn’t call it a travestie for nothing.) And although “chuckle” meant “laugh” from 1548, it seems that chuckleheaded is built rather on the sense of “chuck” meaning “lump” (originally the same word as “chock”). So, the indefatigable lexicographers say, “chuckle-headed” is very like “block-headed”. (There are also the mocking usages “chucklepate” and even “chuckle Chin”.)

Gratifyingly, the sense of a “chucklehead” as someone big, lumbering and clumsy might even represent an extra gleeful ad hominem dart, when applied to the small Mr Amis.

But anyway. I am glad to have learned more from Kakutani’s review than I would have learned from reading The Age of Testicle-Torsioning Infinite Horroristicality. A chucklehead is not, as I had always thought, someone who goes round giggling all the time, but someone whose head is so dense that no mere idea can penetrate it.

What words have you only recently discovered the proper meanings of, readers?

To my shame the Tibet protests taught me “restive”. I kept reading it in reports and it didn’t make sense — I figured it’s a nice tranquil thing, resting. Had to go look it up. How did restive come to mean almost the exact opposite of rest?

At the risk of starting an argument about how words get meaning: I think you’re being a bit hard on yourself. I suspect that the word “chuckle-headed” has what I would have called heuristic meaning (see below). It’s one of those evocative, intuitively-powerful words where, etymyology be damned, you just get the picture. Like its partner, “knuckle-headed”. Thus, you were not in fact wrong about the meaning of “chuckle-headed” even if you were wrong about its precise definition. And to some extent, this is precisely what Amis himself is doing with the neologgorhea pouring out from his clammyshelled bumlips: laugh as we might at the constipated veinbulging that must precede the production of each of his new words, they do conjure up something quiet comprehensible.

Of the many words I’ve mis-used over the years (and the many times I have therefore misspoken), “heuristic” might be the one I most gaffed, in part because I never really knew what it meant, even though I thought I did. And I still don’t really know what it means, even when I look it up. But it certainly doesn’t mean what I thought it meant.

Interestingly, many Dylan songs consist entirely of the word “heuristic”:

Keep It Simple, Modern Times — very much so. It’s early days for me to decide whether Van M. has managed to pack in as much unexpected resonance into his titular cliché as did Bob D.

sw — you are quite right to insist on a distinction between meaning and definition, or if you are not quite right it might at least be a useful heuristic, depending of course on what the latter word means. My heuristic for remembering the meaning of “heuristic” is “It’s a bit like a rule of thumb”. “Rule of thumb”, I guess wildly, comes from carpenters measuring bits of wood with their thumbs. Or does it?

geoff — very good point re stakeholder.

cerebus — the story OED tells about “restive”, interestingly, is that it originally meant “inclined to stay still”, as you would think, and then was applied to mean “obstinate”, of a person, and from there became more generally “inclined to resist control”, not necessarily by remaining motionless but by having ungovernable motion, as of a horse who goes sideways when you want him to go forwards.

I am excited by the thought that Richard has found an antedating for the next edition of the OED.

Perhaps not so much the discovery of the proper meaning but the ignorant way that “lucky country” is applied in Australia, even by some politicians.

People here often use it as a throw-away line whenever something goes well for the country…”well, we are the lucky country after all”.

Dimwits.

The term is actually very critical of Australia from the same titled book, ‘The Lucky Country’, as evidenced below:

Horne’s statement was actually made ironically, as an indictment of 1960s Australia. His intent was to comment that, while other industralised nations created wealth using “clever” means such as technology and other innovations, Australia did not. Rather, Australia’s economic prosperity was largely derived from its rich natural resources. Horne observed that Australia “showed less enterprise than almost any other prosperous industrial society”.

This might not ring as true today, but altering a phrase’s meaning into whatever seems right and literal, despite its origins, is rather rich but not very resourceful.

Having just suffered a nasty bout of shingles (before you ask, the name comes from cingulum, meaning ‘girdle’, via, I think, the French ceinture), I was telling English friends that the characteristic rash must be related to ‘shingles’ as in roof shingles; so-called, said I, because made of slate which splits naturally into thin, usable tiles. I then extended this explanation to ‘shingle beach’, — that is, a beach bed made of slate; this, of course, is a chuckle-headed mistake: it’s a pebble beach.

re “rule of thumb” – wikipedia (and who cares to argue with its authority?) claims that the carpentry source is probably correct, while the wife-beating source is “has been fully discredited.” Nonetheless, the allegation of a connection with domestic violence goes back at least to the 1780s. I’m not sure what to call such an enduring “mistake” in the use of language… if some people use a term intending a certain meaning, doesn’t the term have that meaning?

I’m only talking about the allegation of, or mistaken belief in, a source in English law. I believe any actual source in law has been debunked.

The article cites Jack C. Straton:http://www.europrofem.org/cont.....en_vio.htm
…although I don’t see any evidence of peer review for his statements. He claims to have found “four judges and other legal authorities spanning a time from 1897 back to 1782 who declare this origin for rule of thumb” – always in order to deny the validity of the rule.

The wikipedia article also provides a nice Gillray drawing of “Judge Thumb” from 1782; however false the allegation might have been, it apparently had some currency at that time.

On further reflection, though, I think historical vintage isn’t really the point I wanted to make: if there’s a popular use or meaning for a phrase, which is different from the use approved in dictionaries (eg “decimate:” popularly used to mean “destroy utterly”), and that popular use is well understood, are we right in calling it “wrong”?

definition I was unaware of until this week:Secular (a): a: occurring once in an age or a century b: existing or continuing through ages or centuries c: of or relating to a long term of indefinite duration.
Amazing I’ve got by without it for so long, really. I’m immediately struck by the secular nature of Halley’s comet, solar eclipses and all that.

For some reason that I don’t recall someone recently looked up ‘dingleberry’ in the OED online and showed it to me. I knew the word’s meaning, but it was quite something to see it defined in the precise prose of the OED:

“Heuristic” adj. does not quite mean “edifying”, nor “exemplary”, nor “analoguous”. It concerns drawing out the point of something regardless of immediate application, though with other potential further applications implied. It’s Greek etymology refers to “discovery”. In computation, an “heuristic” n. concerns solving a problem where no algorithm is possible, hence through some sort of trial-and-error procedure. Thus, probably under the influence of cognitive science, “heuristic” n. comes to mean something like “rule of thumb”, a means of application rather than something educed from application. There’s no particular point here, other than perhaps the heuristic one of how the vagueness of words allows for somewhat contrary meanings through their different applications and cases. “Heuristic” is virtually the name for that vagueness of words, by which one can always make a point, even when there is none to be made.